Silent House
by Neon Daisies
Summary: What are the thoughts of those who have to live through an unhappily ever after?


**Disclaimer**: I don't own Sands or his name. I don't own Candyland, sadly enough. I do own the box mentioned later on. Really, this story is ambiguous enough I think to not need a disclaimer, but better safe than sorry, eh?

* * *

She wasn't supposed to be here. 

She wasn't supposed to have the key. But she did of course. Then, just as now, she'd been driven by forces she didn't understand and the key – such an innocuous object – had been carefully placed in many safe homes until one day she'd converted a tin box into her own treasure chest of memories.

Fog veiled the windows of the car as she sat and looked out of the small view hole she'd made for herself. The yard of the house before her was overgrown with weeds. The neighbors must be having hissyfits. The lawn men hadn't been exacting in their care when someone had lived in the house. Now that it was vacant no one cared for it all.

Well, perhaps "no one" was the wrong term.

The clock on the dash read one-thirty. School would be out in less than an hour. Her mother would expect her home half an hour after that.

So little time…

…but then, that'd always been their refrain, hadn't it?

The wind bit into her as she opened the car door. Her down vest only protected her torso and the skin of her arms protested against the small pellets of frozen rain that were sluggishly falling. A "For Sale" sign swung back and forth in the wind, rusted hinges forlornly squeaking as she hurried up the cracked path to the front stoop.

Her key had never fit the lock smoothly. Behind her the screen door rattled as the wind swirled around the cubby-like entry. The cheap doorknob rattled as she forced the lock and opened the door. Before those sounds had always ensured her a welcome of sorts. Not always a warm one and an increasingly belligerent one in recent months.

The door, swollen with damp, shut with difficulty.

He'd never known how often she'd stood there with her eyes shut. For all the times that her mother had accused her of being just like her father, there were a number of things she'd never been able to discuss with him. Her throat convulsed as she breathed out, producing a shuddery little sigh.

Silence. She'd never heard such absolute _silence._ Her visits here had always been accompanied by a soundtrack or commentary provided by the TV or radio. As a part of a generation that was constantly plugged into something – laptop, i-pod, cell phone – she'd thought she'd understood. But as she stood motionless in the dark behind her eyelids, she realized that silence could have a physical weight, one that pushed at eyes and shoulders and lungs.

And he'd so rarely ventured beyond the rattling screen door.

It was no wonder…

One hand rubbed at the heaviness in her chest, the other reached for the i-pod safely tucked away in her pocket.

_No._ The silence unnerved her but she had a feeling that sound would be even worse.

The worn carpet absorbed the sound of her footfalls. Perhaps it wasn't so odd that he'd chosen this place to live. She remembered this house from her childhood. Oh, perhaps not this particular house, but the houses on these blocks had all been built around the same time and most from the same blueprint. The mottled, dingy brown was familiar.

_Hoping against hope that he would have time today. "Play a game with me, Daddy."_

How rarely had he noticed her? How often had he replied "Not right now" without ever looking at her?

So why was the dim memory of lying on her belly on a carpet just like this one so strong? The brightly colored squares that made up the path on a battered piece of cardboard. How she'd loved to play Candyland. That was the design on her memory box; the lid bore a replica of the game board and the rest had a line of blue, red, green, orange, and yellow squares curving, curling about it. Little gingerbread man game pieces.

"_I want to be the blue one, Daddy."_

"_Blue is for boys."_

"_There's no pink one though. I want to be blue."_

She was certain the tip of her nose was red with cold. Absently she unwrapped a piece of peppermint from its noisy cellophane and stuck it in her mouth. In just a few weeks Christmas music might have been playing as she showed up on the doorstep with two spiced apple ciders from Starbucks. And…

"_You landed on a black dot, Daddy. You can't move until you draw a red card."_

"_Look at that," he murmured, his mind on other things as he searched through the deck until he found a red card._

"_You're cheating, Daddy."_

"_Daddy has to go to work soon."_

And he would have made acidic comments about the Christmas season and she would have quietly changed the subject and next time would have come with a caramel latte for one.

"_Look! I got the princess! I win."_

"_You sure do."_

He would say it as he was reaching for his coat, or his keys.

"You stacked the deck," she whispered, momentarily breaking the silence. Once the realization would have disappointed her. Now she wondered why. Had spending time with her really been so painful? Then why had he let her into this house week after week? Had the silence gotten to him so that her company was better than his own? Or had he really been squeezing what time with her he could into his periodic visits? Had the thought of leaving a game unfinished spurred him into cheating so she could win?

"Damn it, Dad." They'd run out of time again. This time their game of "house" would never be completed.

The silence was oppressing.

Quickly she moved through the house, more disappointed than ever that he'd never been a man for keepsakes. She didn't know where her own need came from. Perhaps it was because she could fit all her good memories from high school into a single box that was eight inches square and two inches tall.

The glass lying broken in the hallway was skirted, the bathroom rushed past. She couldn't bear looking in that room; what if no one had come in to clean up once the police had left? If the house was for sale then surely someone must have…

…but what if they'd missed a spot?

What if they hadn't filled the bullet hole in the wall?

Should a daughter have to stand in the room where her father had…?

His bedroom was just as cold as the rest of the house. The open closet door revealed hanger after hanger of black shirts.

"_Everything matches if everything is black."_

Why had she come here? The heaviness in her chest increased with each breath and it wasn't the cold that was stinging her eyes.

If she'd just _said_ something. To someone. But then her closemouthed ways were one of the things she'd had in common with him.

Other than the clothing, even this room was empty of personal effects. No photographs, no knickknacks.

In her pocket her cell phone started vibrating. Likely one of her friends wanted to know why she wasn't in class. They hadn't known where she went every Tuesday afternoon. The hadn't known about the funeral last week or why she'd had to excuse herself from several classes only to return with red-rimmed eyes. They'd wondered, but she hadn't offered to share the reason. She hadn't even been able to explain to herself the reason for her grief.

Now she knew: wasted opportunities. And not her own.

His.

_What a terrible, **pointless** waste._

Her heart ached as she accepted what she'd known for a long time. There still wasn't anything here for her, she realized as she looked at the product of a barren life. Her peace with her father had been made long ago.

Coming here hadn't been for her benefit. She'd learned that encounters with him left her feeling bruised inside more often than not. And she'd gotten rid of any expectations of him before she'd first showed up on his doorstep. "_You can't be disappointed if you never expect anything."_ Her visits had been solely for him. Because the house was so very, very quiet. This visit was out of duty because a daughter ought to have felt more for the death of her father.

Then again, he'd never been much of a father and he'd never known what to do with his daughter.

The squeaky floorboard in the hallway groaned under her weight as she walked back to the living room. A CD rack sat abandoned in one corner of the room. She paused, thinking about the songs she'd heard in this house and never heard anywhere else.

Her purse was big enough to hold the small collection. They wouldn't fit in her memory box, but he was already in it in the form of a small picture taken with her cell phone and two newspaper clippings.

"_A man was found dead in a house on the south-eastern block of Westing Avenue. today by police… The department spokeswoman said they're waiting on the results of an autopsy to confirm that the death was a suicide. No foul play suspected…_

"_Sheldon Jeffrey Sands was the son of Mary and Thomas Sands…he is survived by one daughter…"_

* * *

**Author's Note:** well, there I was, working on another project because my forehead was sore from banging my head against my computer screen while I struggle with the latest chapter of "A Different Story." I was an innocent bystander until the line from a song that I've been listening to for hours on end for the past two days wormed its way into my mind and the ficlet fleas started biting my ankles. The song was "Silent House" by the Dixie Chicks, which is actually a song about Alzheimer's, and the line was "I will try to connect all the pieces you left." Ultimately that line didn't have much to do with this vignette, but there the idea was planted in my head: what if Sands had a family of sorts though he had separated from him, what if he had returned to the US, and what if the burden of his experience in Mexico was eventually too much for him to live with? And so this mildly depressing like fic was born. 

It's not a Sands I've written before. I've written a Sands with no family who comes to be with a woman who's adopted one. I've written a Sands with a family and most importantly a wife who's willing to fight for him. I've never written a Sands who's lived through a divorce. I suppose I still haven't since I'm dealing with the daughter who had to live through her mother's divorce from a man who was never cut out to be a family man and I suspect that's who Sands really is once we step past that scene where he tells the boy in the yellow shirt to run. As is said in another Johnny Depp movie, "One good deed does not redeem a man of a lifetime of wickedness."

I thought it was an interesting POV to take.


End file.
